Doping@HP the case of polyethylene: superconductivity!

High pressure is an exciting field that has evolved incredibly far since the pioneering work of Cailletet, Amagat and Bridgman. A substantial amount of research in the field of high pressure (post-Bridgman era) was triggered by the tantalizing idea of metalizing hydrogen (Wigner and Huntington transition) which dates back to the mid 30’s. The metalization of hydrogen is seen as the holy-grail of high pressure research, it has been a compelling subject of great interest for many scientists ranging from experimental chemists and physicists to theoreticians, including Prof. Gross (my former boss in Max-Planck, Halle).

It is well understood, that compression of molecular systems at high pressure increases the electron-orbital overlap between neighboring atoms resulting in an increase of the band dispersions consequently closing the electronic band gap. Chemical pre-compression is certainly one promising route to reduce the metalization pressure on insulating elements, but not the only one! Another method to reach metalization is chemical doping under pressure –a path previously used at ambient pressures to render standard insulators superconducting.– We demonstrated theoretically this approach for H2O.

In our latest article, we investigated the structural stability of polyethylene (H2C)n under pressure. The questions we want to address in the work were: is there a stable polyethylene phase under pressure that can be doped? if yes, is it superconducting? Finally, we dedicated this article to Prof. Hardy Gross, for his 65th birthday. This research article would appear in the Topical Issue “Special issue in honor of Hardy Gross” edited by C.A. Ullrich, F.M.S. Nogueira, A. Rubio, and M.A.L. Marques.